Cuba’s Hospitals Run Short on Blood for Operations
“Without a blood donation they won’t operate on you”
In 2003 there were 585,000 voluntary donors; twenty years later, not even half that number, just 254,845.
HAVANA TIMES – On the shoulders of the Cuban patient lies not only the responsibility to get syringes and drugs before surgery. Now, more and more often, carrying a blood donation is a prerequisite for undergoing an operation. In Holguín, those who do not have someone who, for friendship or money, gives them their blood are forced to postpone the surgery.
“Please, an AB+ blood donor is urgently needed at the provincial hospital in Camagüey. If anyone could help, thank you,” reads a Facebook group where residents of Holguín meet and sell imported clothes that are reported stolen. These appeals alternate with other publications that say the self-sacrificing donor will be rewarded with a payment of between 5,000 and 7,000 pesos.
Rafael, a volunteer with dozens of donations in his history, has seen people come to the Provincial Blood Bank practically begging for a donation, just hours before a family member must have surgery. This Monday, the scene was repeated before his eyes when he decided to help a young neighbor who last weekend had a motorcycle accident.
“The treatment by the staff was friendly, excellent, with explanations and educational chats,” says Rafael, who immediately adds the other side of the coin. “But it is now customary in Holguín that when someone goes in for surgery, he has to bring a blood donation. There was a case of a man who had to be operated on the next day, and if he wasn’t bringing a donor, they wouldn’t operate.”
Although it is not officially stipulated that the patient is responsible for managing the donation, the fact is that the practice of imposing this responsibility on the person concerned has spread throughout the country. The requirement to have a document certifying the donation has fueled the informal donation market to the detriment of altruism. ” There are people who have no one to give them blood but also don’t have the money to pay for it,” says Rafael.
For years, the national blood bank system achieved high levels of self-sufficiency thanks to a combination of health education, social pressure from the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution as well as labor and student centers. But that stability began to deteriorate after the Special Period and has worsened further over the last decade.
A recent article in the Spanish media Rebelión, connected to the Cuban regime, addressed the issue in the tone of a harangue. The author reviewed the dramatic drop in the volume of voluntary donations, comparing the 585,000 registered in 2003 to 415,000 in 2014. But according to data from 2023, the situation was worse, reaching only 254,845 donations. The Pan American Health Organization measures efficiency in this sector at a rate of one donation per 20 inhabitants, so that Cuba (0.44) does not reach half the target. The article called for “less apologetics” and “more knocking on doors, even to guarantee something as elementary as a good snack afterwards to those who donate.”
The conditions of the blood banks, hit by the crisis, also do not help much. A few years ago, the “strengthening snacks” that were given after extraction to help revive the donor were legendary. Little remains of those sandwiches with ham and cheese, sometimes accompanied by a milkshake or flavored milk .
This Monday, after filling a bag with 450 milliliters of blood, Rafael was given a small, poor-quality ration of food. ” They gave me a strange bread, with a kind of raw sausage, a glass of watered-down soda and a small glass of milk with a stale cookie,” he says. When he left, still a little weak from the effort, the man who was desperately looking for a donation was still there, waiting to find someone to help him.
During the time that Rafael spent at the blood bank, “few people arrived.” Most were “people who were donating directly to patients.” Some, of course, did it as a business because they barely knew the name of the patient that was supposed to be on the donation form. In Cuba, the need for blood is no longer solved with harangues.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.